Posted by: Qasim Virjee on Thursday, 05 February 2009

Years ago the only forum component specifically for Joomla was called Simpleboard.  It installed natively and worked pretty well with Joomla user information and other extensions like Community Builder (which extends user info with profiles etc...)  As its name implied, Simpleboard wasn't too difficult to deal with, until you wanted to custom theme it - back then Joomla developers likely kept bottles of asprin in close reach!

In the past couple of years Simpleboard got rebranded as Joomlaboard and then became Fireboard - which until recently was the best fully-integrated forum solution in Joomla.  Alternative approaches involve bridging your Joomla site to an install of other software - such as phpBB or SMF; which sounds great but often becomes a nightmare as its very difficult to accurately and consistently ensure that users are logged in and out of both software etc...

Well, I just did an install of Agora yesterday - its a new extension that basically ports the simple-but-powerful punBB Open Source forum software into Joomla.  The default style it comes with is hideous, though its code is pretty CSS-friendly; took me a few hours but I'm quite pleased with the look of my resulting forum install.  Of course, it seems reasonable that you should be able to jump over to punBB's resource site and apply mod's and styles to your Agora install - so you may not need to roll your own CSS.

I highly recommend this extension for anyone who needs to install a forum on their site - the full administration is front-end and it has its own user management interface so you'll be able to make ecrtain folks mdoerators of the forums you want to and so on!

If you've checked Agora out - please do drop a line in the comments below to let us all know how you like it; I'm curious to see how it interfaces with other extensions - and to be honest, am not sure if I've seen any modules for it to display forum information (like 'new posts') outside of the forum itself.

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Styles posted by Jason Boyette on 2009-02-09 You mention the default style is hideous, and it truly is. Do you know of any place to get a better style, without having to change the CSS or swap out better button images yourself? Quote

posted by jamie on 2009-02-09 Can you give a little info on changing the css? I just installed Agora and would like to make it look like it actually belongs on my site -- how and where can I update the css? Thank yoU! Quote

Agora posted by Phil on 2009-02-10 I installed this after reading the number of positive reviews. The CSS page although as hideous as the templates was pretty simple to alter and have a reasonably attractive design. The experience and functionality was poor. Users found it extremely hard to understand and use. It was hit by spammers on a few occassions and had no security to block known ip addresses of spammers or even manually enter ip addresses to block. The admin panel could only be accessed from the front of the site, not from within the joomla admin panel. In the end it was nothing but trouble and was uninstalled Quote

How to edit Agora's CSS posted by designguru on 2009-02-11 I'll be posting a more in-depth review of Agora next week with some tips and tricks on common edits to make it more usable, but in the meantime lets look at the CSS question: Ultimately, Agora's theming isn't too cleanly separated from its core code. So, if you want to move items around you may have to jump into the php files (which are at least named well and feature div styling rather than a lot of tables like in Fireboard) - look to the 'components/com_agora/' directory. However, if you just want to change colors and apply your own CSS styling to your forum, then head over to 'components/com_agora/style' and make a copy of the included 'Impact_light.css' file - edit it to your hearts content and upload it to the same directory called something else, then go into the forum's admin panel & choose 'Options' from the 'Global Settings' menu -you'll see the name of your new css file show up in the 'default style' pulldown - select it and save the options. Quote

posted by jamie on 2009-02-26 where can I find the components directory? in fact, where can i find ANY directory in joomla? Quote

haha posted by zipperhead on 2010-03-10 I had used Agora for years. Everytime I tried to install an update, it dind't install correctly if at all, and I always had to go back into a recovery mode and bother the webhosts to restore the site from a backup. I attempted to go to the Agora site and ask for help, and oddly enough, my question was never answered, and I was literally ran off from the support boards - and HACKED just minutes later. I was removed from the HELP BOARDS for asking for HELP, and then my AGORA FORUM was HACKED.....hrmmm... Good luck with it folks - my experience totally sucked, and the only way I would use AGORA anymore would be if they actually installed it, and fixed all of the bugs, and also moved over all of the posts for me, and charged me nothing! That's my experience - you asked for comments.... I won't release my site URL again - not after being attacked like I was last time. Fixed it from a backup like every other time....oh well...moving to phpbb3 asap and I've got to manually mov... Quote

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